🆕 UPDATED Glidegram - social media app (follow/unfollow, unread messages & more)

Lisa · January 15, 2021, 3:29pm

Hi Gliders,

After several days of working through the kinks, I’m sharing my first public app, Glidegram!

The Glide team has been so consistent with new features, I wanted to create a social media app using some, if not all, of the newest releases.

The app has the following features:

Direct messaging (private chat and chat requests)
Following (favorites)
Carousel posts
Post comments
Archiving posts
Activity (or ‘notifications’) section
Saving posts
Reporting users

I’m looking forward to creating more tailored apps for broader use cases, but this one was a lot of fun.

Christophe_HK · May 17, 2020, 2:14pm

Very nice app, clean and efficient, congrats!

Just one thing : in the profile section, there’s an empty circle tile, as shown in this screenshot :

I love also the About section

Robert_Petitto · May 17, 2020, 2:15pm

Looks great. Very polished. Noticed I have a second profile image placeholder.

Lisa · May 17, 2020, 2:41pm

Thank you! @Robert_Petitto @Christophe_HK I saw that bug as well. It may have something to do with me adding another column to the 'App: Login" sheet? I used the UNIQUE formula as the source for the user profile emails on my user profile sheet.

I ended up filtering to remove the blank placeholder. Looks like that did the trick.

Jeff_Hager · May 17, 2020, 3:37pm

First of all, gorgeous app! I also just want to warn you about using the UNIQUE formula to build a user profile sheet from the app: logins sheet. If any of the data in App: Logins is ever shuffled around or deleted, it’s going to break all of your user profiles because the data in that sheet will be reshuffled and not match up with any other user profile columns you have. I would recommend using Glides built in User Profiles to automatically create a user profile record with email in your user profile sheet.

https://docs.glideapps.com/all/reference/privacy-and-per-user-data/user-profiles

Lisa · May 17, 2020, 4:04pm

Thank you @Jeff_Hager! And you’re right, I believe that was causing the issue with the bug.

I’ll need to adjust some things so that user profiles aren’t relying on that formula. Thank you for the resource!

Nico · May 17, 2020, 4:31pm

Hey Lisa,

can´t make the direct chat function working.

Lisa · May 17, 2020, 4:36pm

Hi Nico, can you share a screenshot? The chat is designed so that the user you want to chat with has to ‘accept’ the chat first. Let me know what bug you’re seeing and I can try to figure what’s going on.

Thanks for testing!

Stephanie_Bonnet · May 17, 2020, 4:40pm

Looks lovely. How did you create the about page with those various sub-pages? Also, the private chat seems really interesting, I didn’t see in the help documentation how to create that?

Lisa · May 17, 2020, 5:28pm

@Nico, I believe I fixed this bug. Let me know if you can see the requests and pending chats or if you run into a different bug.

Lisa · May 17, 2020, 5:32pm

Thank you @Stephanie_Bonnet. I created an “About” sheet with one row for each (legal, policy, etc.). I made that tab a ‘detail’ tab and pulled in the information using an inline list.

For the image, I used the ‘Single value’ function and pulled in an image I have saved on a sheet called ‘UI’ for images and such that have one value that I like to use across the entire app (images, links, etc.)

Lisa · May 17, 2020, 5:37pm

For private chat, my approach was creating a ‘chat’ form. By adding ‘comments’ to chats and setting the topic as the ‘chat Id’ , each chat has it’s own set of comments.

Users only see the chats they are added to or created using a filter and visibility conditions.

Stephanie_Bonnet · May 17, 2020, 5:52pm

Thank you. I had done this but put the various elements of the about page as “column” instead of rows. I will modify this according to your model.

sardamit · May 17, 2020, 7:02pm

Loved playing with this.
Any idea why I see this? Username already taken?

Robert_Petitto · May 17, 2020, 7:14pm

I have a messages template in the store that you could use if you wanted to see behind the scenes:
https://www.glideapps.com/templates/GgjCXWmFRfjKpCG3Fs9j-template

Lisa · May 17, 2020, 7:29pm

Thanks for testing @sardamit!

That was me playing around with a formula to create an alert for when there’s a duplicate username. Almost worked, but it’s too dependent on Google sheets formula.

I’m looking forward to more advanced Glide formulas so that it can all happen in Glide

Lucas_Pires · May 17, 2020, 7:47pm

Awesome job! Loved this clean design, congrats @Lisa

Lisa · May 18, 2020, 5:57am

Thank you @Lucas_Pires

garrison · May 18, 2020, 8:34am

@Robert_Petitto: Your messenger app looks slick, love it!

For our use case, we are looking to enable private chat for when a user is on a specific listing (detail layout) so that instead of looking up users to instigate a private chat, they would click a button on listing which would put them in direct private contact with the person who owns the listing.

Is this doable?

Also, as chats pile up in the sheet, I presume they count as rows and therefore could at some point exceed the row quotas in Glide?

@Lisa: Love your app, and in particular your solution for the about page!

Robert_Petitto · May 18, 2020, 11:12am

Hi Garrison,

Yes, this can be done! In stead of using the user information from the user profile, you’d Use the user info from the listing to create the chat. Since the chat leverages the comments feature, it doesn’t count against row quota. Only one row per chat is used (to house the info connecting one user to the other).